“Fine.”
Suce looked down at her hands and then at the slant of sunlight along the floor. “I hear that husband of hers left her a fine house. Is that so?”
“Yes ma’am. Right fine house.” Beka dug into the suitcase and removed two tattered bras, three pairs of bloomers, a girdle, and then her hand hesitated as she reached for the brown dress.
“Inside plumbing, just like she say?”
“Uh-huh.”
Suce watched Beka’s hand hover over the brown dress and so she reached in and snatched it up, revealing the bottle of bath salts and silk stockings beneath it.
“Humph,” Suce said, and tossed the dress down to the bed.
Vonnie strained to see from his place in the hallway and made a disapproving sound.
If she was light-skinned enough, Beka would have turned beet red. But she wasn’t, so the flesh of her neck burned beneath the collar of her dress.
“When she coming back?”
She ain’t
, Beka wanted to say,
not ever.
“Next week, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“She say on Tuesday. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
Beka breathed. She was a coward, wasn’t she? The eldest and the weakest. Cursed for sure. Grown and still cowering like she was five.
“That’s what she say, Mama.” Beka’s voice climbed a level too high for a child, grown or not, and she felt more than saw Suce go rigid.
“Sass? Where you pick that up at? The train, Lillie, Phila-del-phia?”
Beka said nothing. Suce turned and walked away.
As she went, Vonnie followed, pulling the silver timepiece from his pocket and staring down at its face as if the answer to Suce’s questions lay in the Roman numerals and the reach of the black long hand.
___________________
That was a year ago and now Beka was back in Phila-del-phia trying to help Helen pack away thirteen years of Lillie’s life.
Dead, just like that.
A cough.
A rattle, but no sneezing.
Too weak to stand and dizzy when she tried.
“Maybe you pregnant,” Helen had whispered.
“Nah, been pregnant four times and ain’t none of them felt like this,” Lillie wheezed.
“Each one is different,” Helen said.
“How would you know?”
Helen put her to bed, went to work, came back, and found Lillie as white as a sheet.
“I’m gonna get you a doctor,” Helen said, her voice worried, her face dark. “Lovey, you go next door and ask Mrs. Casey if you can use her phone.”
“I ain’t leaving my mama,” Lovey said venomously, and moved to Lillie’s bedside.
Helen glared at her and then turned to Beanie Moe. “You go. And don’t give me no mouth.”
Helen held one hand and Lovey held the other while Dumpling held Wella and watched from the corner of the room.
Helen jumped up when she heard Beanie Moe burst through the front door and bound up the stairs. “Doctor say he can’t come before six,” he said, out of breath.
Helen looked at her watch; it was four o’clock.
By six, Lillie was breathing heavy, gasping for air, pushing away the glass of water Helen tried to get her to drink, snatching off the wet washcloth Lovey had placed on her head, and still no doctor.
Her skin was raging by then, fever eating her up from the inside out and Lillie mumbling about home and babies and Vonnie.
At the sound of her brother’s name Helen’s hands began to flutter about nervously and she leaned in close to Lillie and whispered, “Shhh, now, sister.”
At seven, Lillie’s eyes flew open and fixed on the ceiling. Her lips were chapped, with angry red seams running through them. “Damn him, damn him,” Lillie sputtered, and Helen knew just who her sister was cussing. She patted Lillie’s hand and threw an expectant glance at Lovey and then toward the doorway of the room. “He gonna suffer too. He gonna suffer worse!” Lillie yelped, and then gulped in a great amount of air.
Lovey’s body jerked in surprise and Helen braced herself. She could see that Lillie was trying to hang on to the air, and she helped her along by holding her own breath until Lillie’s eyes rolled in her head and she squeezed the hands that held hers. Before Helen could utter a word, a cry, or a sound, Lovey leaned over, pressed her open mouth over her mother’s, and took Lillie’s last breath.
___________________
The children mourned the loss of their mother in different ways.
Beanie Moe went around punching walls, Dumpling ate until she puked and then ate some more, while Lovey just walked around pretending that her mother being dead didn’t matter at all. Wella, too young to understand most of what was happening, began asking for her mama less and less as the days went by.
Beka had told them about life in Sandersville: outhouses, hauling spring water, feeding hogs and chickens, milking cows, and picking cotton.
“Picking cotton?” Lovey’s eyes narrowed. “I ain’t no slave.”
“Got to watch out for snakes,” Beka said in a quaking voice. “
Sssssssssss
,” she said as she leaned in to Wella’s ear.
All the children laughed—except Lovey, who made a face.
“And the white folk. Gots to be careful ’bout the white folk,” Helen added matter-of-factly as she scanned the room for more breakables.
“What about them?” Beanie Moe asked.
“Nothing,” Beka said curtly, snatching a vase up and handing it to her sister. “You ain’t got no more to worry ’bout white folk in Sandersville than you do with white folk here in Phila-del-phia.”
“White folk and Vonnie,” Helen muttered under her breath.
“Who?” Dumpling asked, eyes bulging.
Beka’s head snapped around. “Have you forgot yourself, sister?”
Helen looked down at the vase, concentrating on the small red flowers that dotted its surface. Yes, yes, she had forgot herself. Had done it purposely, left herself right there on that train that brought her to Philadelphia and stepped down onto that gray platform a determined woman. She’d forgot herself is right, forgot who she was in Sandersville and threw herself into who she could be in Phila-del-phia. Forgot herself in the pots she scrubbed and the shirts she pressed. Forgot herself at the Friday-night dances and the Sunday picnics. Forgot all of herself when she let Irving Matthers press himself up against her and kiss her full on the lips.
And even as she packed and wrapped, she was still forgetting herself, because she had pinky sworn with Lillie that she would do everything in her power to keep her kids in Phila-del-phia and away from that place, should something ever happen to her.
And here she was, so well forgotten that she couldn’t even remember how to say four simple words:
No, they ain’t going
.
“I guess so.” Helen breathed and grabbed at a piece of newspaper and began wrapping it around the vase.
___________________
The way Lovey explained it, out there on the front porch the day before they left Philadelphia forever, Dumpling’s ugliness started at the bottom, on the soles of her feet, fanning out into ten horribly deformed toes and then the acorn-sized growths that sprouted from the sides of her big toes like cabbage heads. Not only that, she was fat.
Beanie Moe was string-bean thin with buckteeth and bulging eyes that forever graced his face with a look of utter stupidity or eternal surprise. And he was black—pitch, in fact.
Baby Wella, just three years old and still shitting herself, bowlegged, with a horrible habit of sucking her thumb.
Lovey was the only beautiful one. The only one with any sense; she told them so as she lined them up single file on the front porch, inspecting their ears for wax and the corners of their eyes for cold while she reminded them of their ugliness and why they’d better learn to mind or Grandma Suce would send them off to one of those homes for children who had no parents.
Lillie, dead for nearly eight days and the smell of carnations still lingering everywhere, and the children were not able to close their eyes without seeing the soft beige of the coffin, the brass handles, or the red laced gloves on the hands that lay crossed and still on Lillie’s silent chest.
Eight days and sounds all around them and still their ears rang with the heavy notes that came from the organ, the solemn words the pastor spoke to the few faces that looked back at him.
No one had out and out wept except them, the children. Although the men looked pained and the aunts’ eyes ran water and their hankies came back damp and dirty with face powder after they’d dabbed at their faces. But their bodies did not shudder with sorrow, not once, and that made Lovey angry.
Eight days and Lovey and the rest of the children were still biding their time at the wide picture window, boxes all around them—some packed, others empty, nothing taped closed, the lids flipping open like limp wings.
How do you pack away thirteen years of living?
Helen and Beka aren’t sure, but they try their best and claim Lillie’s dresses for themselves. Those, along with the china and pieces of jewelry that neither one of them can tell if they are real or not. There wasn’t enough money to ship the furniture back home, and it hurt Helen’s heart to see that fine sofa and dining room set sold away to strangers.
Eight days and the children only have words for one another, except for Wella who is too young to understand death. But she understands
gone
and asks, “When Mama coming home?”
The rest, though, mill around the picture window and whisper to one another and themselves as they stare through the daylight hours and moonlit nights willing Lillie back amongst the living and strolling down Bangor Street gay and laughing, high-heeled and hair just a-bouncing or swaying, depending on which walk she felt like using. Some new beau at her side, grinning as he carted a bag of groceries or some new boxed hat or bagged dress. And them waiting on the porch for her, happy to know that she’d come home from wherever she’d been and not minding at all that there was a man with her, because they knew how to share.
There would be kisses and introductions and the man, whoever he was that week, would press pennies into their palms without barely looking at them and would never ever remember all of their names, his mind stuck on and mesmerized by Lillie’s legs and that gorgeous “follow me” ass that cocked out behind her like a black ant’s.
Later, while the man waited in the parlor, twirling his hat in his hands and checking the crease in his pants, the children—if they were clean—would sit on the settee and watch him until the perspiration trickled down the sides of his face and his questions about schoolwork and other stupid things adults say to children waned to just small noises in his throat. Lillie would reappear in whatever new dress he had bought her, with Evening in Paris dabbed on her wrists and behind her ears, saving him from the steady stares of the children, and off they would go. Lillie brushing kisses against their cheeks and reminding them to be good and to listen to their big sister Lovey and then, “Mama be back soon,” “Mama be back late,” or just “Goodbye.”
Sometimes
soon
or
late
was the following Monday or Tuesday or a whole week later. Those times, Lovey thought that the goodbye was for real, but she never let on to the smaller ones and held it all together just like Lillie had taught her.
And she would do the same again, even in a place as godforsaken as Sandersville, Georgia.
___________________
Suce rolled the child’s name over in her mind:
Love
.
Love, Suce had decided, was everything but.
Unkind to everything, it seemed, that walked and breathed: the chickens, the hog, and the runt of a mutt called Vim.
Boastful about her beauty, long-haired and bright in color, and those eyes—gray most days, green in dim light—and proud as hell of her height, her figure, and the delicateness of her hands.
Rude enough for five of her kind and self-seeking in the worst way; nothing was happening if it didn’t benefit her, and if it happened anyway and she wasn’t included, the anger would come on like a storm.
Good at recording the wrongs of others and slack when called on to remember her own.
Just downright evil, and a liar to boot. When Vonnie went to fetch Beka, Helen, Lovey, and the rest of the children from the train, Lovey took one look at her uncle, lifted her hand, pointed a long delicate finger at him, and declared, “Eeeeeeeeew, what ran over your mouth?” while the other children just stared.
Bernard Moses—“Just call me Beanie Moe,” he’d said, and stuck out his hand in greeting when he was presented to Suce—was a sight: long and lanky, bucktoothed, and not easy on the eyes at all. Just seven years old and looking everything like that short-legged man who’d come and took Lillie away in his fancy automobile. Dark-eyed and kinky-haired. No doubt Corinthians had planted
that
seed.
Dumpling—Clementine Marie on the birth certificate and scrawled in ink on the back page of Suce’s Bible. Short and round, with eyes like moons and a belly to match. Hair thick, yet short and a mess to get into on Saturdays. But a joy to be around, always smiling, and mouth always working at something—a peach, a slice of watermelon, a chicken leg. Happy as long as she was full, ecstatic if she was near busting.
Now Wella—odd name, and Suce was just calling her baby girl, but neighbors steady on finding a nickname for her. A cute little thing. Pudgy but particular about what she ate, and rough too, keeping up with Beanie Moe and not wanting to kiss Suce or any of her aunties and preferring instead to share that sweetness with the thin lips of the dog.
In Suce’s old age and after birthing fifteen children and raising twelve to adulthood, she had become a mother again, to four.
___________________
The morning was the best time of the day, Vonnie mused, as he stepped through the doorway and inhaled deeply. The air was freshest just before dawn and sweet, even in the wintertime when the flowers were dead.
He took a few steps, and the hounds that slept close to the house peeked over their paws at him and their tails began to thump the ground.